FAQ’s

The Association of Support Professionals is an international membership organization for customer support managers, executives, professionals, and those interested in the field. Each year the ASP publishes several reports covering a wide range of topics of interest to its members. This includes the annual Ten Best Web Support Sites award and report, an annual salary survey, financial and benchmark reports and new or changing issues. ASP also provides workshops and negotiates discounts for members at industry events and career development services.

How Many Members do You Have?
Currently, we have more than 1,200 individual members.

What is the Membership Profile?
Members are primarily managers, Directors, Executives, Analysts and other professionals who run technical support organizations at software and other technology companies. They typically support products ranging in price from a few dollars to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Their support groups range from a few individuals to thousands. There are a few company members from internal technical support groups in hotels, insurance companies, and local and country government agencies.

How do I Become a Member?
Joining is easy. You sign up online via our secure sign-up page. When you sign up, your email address will be your username and you will choose a password that you can remember. You will then have immediate access to the members-only part of our website. If you do forget, you can go back to the members log in page and choose forgot password. We will send you the password right away.

What Benefits Come with ASP Membership?
ASP members automatically receive all our reports and surveys free of charge. These reports are made available online to members only, and can be accessed at any time with your user name and password.

Members receive the ASP News, a monthly e-mail newsletter. The ASP News keeps members informed of ASP activities, forthcoming reports, new publications and discounts, and its also a forum for dialogue between the ASP and its members.

The Members Only section of our Web site is also a powerful networking tool for support professionals. The online Member Directory contains a complete listing of our member base, indexed by name, company, and state/province. The directory allows members to easily contact other members in their area.

We also negotiate substantial member discounts for conferences, seminars, and other support-related services.

When I Sign Up, does My Company Become a Member too?
No, not if you buy an individual membership. Your company can, however, purchase a Corporate membership as a small ( under $100 million), medium ($100 Million to $999 Million), or large ($1 Billion and up) company.

How Long are Memberships and How do They Renew?
ASP memberships run for twelve months, starting whenever you join. When your membership is up for renewal, you’ll be sent a renewal notice asking you if you’d like to renew your membership. Memberships are never automatically renewed.

Do You Sell My e-mail Address?
No, we never sell or rent members information. If you sign up for one of our free webinars, however, they are sponsored (so they can be free) and the sponsor receives your email address.

Where Can I Get Answers to Support Management Questions?
Executive director Al Hahn is always happy to answer questions about our research and discuss any service or support topics. We have assembled a group of accomplished independent consultants who have agreed to provide one hour of free consulting. We also have a very large group (over 7,500) on LinkedIn where members and interested parties frequently post questions. Responses tend to be rapid and spirited.

Do You Accept Advertising on Your Website?
No, we do not. We do, however, have selected sponsors and partners. Their logos are displayed on our website, with hot links should you choose to check them out. We are very selective in choosing them and avoid any that are just in it for the money. They have to be offering real tools and services that our members find useful to qualify. We do have sponsors for our webinars, research, and Joint Symposium to help pay for those activities. This allows us to keep our dues at a lower cost. We also negotiate discounts at events that we believe are worthwhile for our members. In many cases, the discount for one event can be more than a years membership in ASP costs.

Do You Have a Conference?
No, not at this time. We have had conferences from time to time and also sponsor some other industry conferences. We do have workshops both in-person and remote. Watch for our announcements on our Home page and in our newsletter.

At Cisco we've entered ASP's "Top Ten" for years for both the reality check and the visability

Chris Vejan, Digital Support Comres Lead

The Association of Support Professionals Top 10 Support Sites Award is immensely valuable for Jive. Not only does it provide recognition for our online support solution, it also gives reliable insight and feed back from industry experts that we implement to be even better the following year.

Kevin Williams, Jive Software

The Association of Support Professionals Top 10 Support Web Sites was a great process for our team to work through. Along with being a great opportunity to showcase the work of the many teams that contribute to our online support experience, the submission process itself helped in along some very well defined dimensions, where we stood among our peers. The breakdown of feedback across those dimensions then helped us identify and prioritize improvements that would most benefit our customers. I highly recommend the submission process as a means to help your top opportunities and feed your overall roadmap.

Matt Phillips, Symantec

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The Red Hat Customer Portal being named one of the 10 Best Web Support Sites for six years in a row is a humbling experience, and feedback we receive from the judges each year shows there is always room for further improvement. These insights from judges assist us in planning our development and strategy to better engage our customers and stay competitive in the industry year after year.